Latest strategies for attracting Black college students to advisory careers take long view

It’s a push and a pull to attract Black college students into the investment sector. They don’t know what they don’t know about the range of positions, skills and professional growth — and when they're intrigued, they’re not sure where to find the industry’s open doors.

Those are the dynamics that Chris Fils navigates as he answers questions in open, online forums from students at historically Black colleges and universities. He's a complex manager with Raymond James and as one of its rising leaders, an ambassador on behalf of his employer and the entire industry to a cohort that is highly coveted and hard to win.

A new crop of programs takes a measured approach by cultivating relationships with Black students early in their college careers in hopes of accompanying them into their first jobs. Partly in response to long-term trends and partly in response to the wrenching eruptions of racial discrimination and violence in the past two years, some financial industry companies are elevating their outreach to Black college students.

The game is long indeed, say corporate recruiters and talent scouts, because many Black college students have scant knowledge of or experience with the advice industry.  

“Unless you’re getting educated by your professors, either through coursework or by the culture, you’ll hear about this business through people you know,” said Julie Ragatz, vice president of Next Gen and Advisor Development programs with Carson Group. “And because this industry is mainly white and their networks will be mainly white and males, we won’t see a switch in the natural referral system until we see as switch in diversity.”

There’s plenty of work to be done.

Few CFPs are Black: The latest data from the CFP Board found that only 1.8% of its credentialed members are Black. Meanwhile, Blacks comprise 12.4% of all Americans, and another 1.8% are multiracial, with at least some Black forbears, according to the 2020 Census.

Tulipshare, a UK-based, self-described “activist platform” for individual investors, found through a survey released in June that ethnic minorities in the tech sector are three times as likely to have experienced racial microaggressions than those in non-tech sectors. The survey found that 43% of tech employees reported explicit racism at work. Fintech is integral to the investment sector, which spends about 10% of its revenue on technology, with the fintech sector estimated to reach $310 billion globally this year.

In June, PGIM, the investment management arm of Prudential Financial, Inc., launched a program that provides professional development training for those who manage HBCU endowments, paired with student-run investment funds and scholarships.

Raymond James is weaving multiple entry points into multidimensional career paths by expanding a suite of complementary programs. Its two-year-old Wealth Management Associate Program created a prerequisite for a long-established program that helps new advisers establish their careers; 79% of last year’s cohort in the Wealth MAP program were women or people of color. Raymond James’ programs are yielding results, with women comprising 45% of the firm’s overall workforce and people of color 20%.

Some of the firm’s momentum comes from outlining to students and young employees the wide scope of careers in the financial industry, said Fils. “It’s educating them that there are so many opportunities – marketing, alternative investments, technology. Maybe being a financial adviser is tomorrow. Maybe there’s a glide path to becoming a financial adviser.”

The wider the outreach, the greater the awareness and the deeper the potential momentum, said Kristi Martin Rodriguez, senior vice president of the Nationwide Retirement Institute at Nationwide Finance.

Launched in 2020, Nationwide's apprenticeship program works with students at three high schools in its home city of Columbus, Ohio. The students are the first in their families to attend college and have a chance to work at Nationwide and tap tuition support as they work toward business degrees.

“We’re trying to open up the industry to show that there isn’t just one path” to investment careers, Rodriguez said. “There are a number of roles: How do we create an ecosystem in a communal environment where you can get support, and we can show the breadth and depth of what’s involved in the industry?”

“You have to find them, you have to look,” said Carson’s Ragatz. “You have to go into career fairs and reimagine career paths in this business, and imagine skills you haven’t worked with before. In this business we’ve suffered from a lack of imagination about who can be successful. It’s a blindness we are all accountable for. If you want a career in this business, there’s little to hold you back, but your path might different, and companies need to understand that.”